Perceived Leader Integrity Scale
(PLIS)

Overview & History

The PLIS is 360° leadership assessment instrument for assessing impressions
of the integrity, ethics, and destructive behaviors of managers and leaders. It
was originally developed as a research tool by Craig and Gustafson in 1995. The
PLIS was later modified to facilitate upward developmental feedback and
published in The Leadership Quarterly in 1998. Since that time, the PLIS
has been augmented to permit true multi-source assessment via observers with
diverse relationships to the focal leader, translated into Spanish and Mandarin,
and used in scores of research studies and organizational assessments all over
the world.

The PLIS was developed by industrial-organizational psychologists at Virginia
Tech and North Carolina State University, using state-of-the-art psychometric
techniques, including item response theory and confirmatory factor analysis. The
40-item version demonstrates a unidimensional factor structure, reflecting
perceivers' overall impression of a leader's ethical integrity, Cronbach's alpha
internal consistency estimates greater than .95, and appropriate patterns of
convergent and discriminant validity relative to other variables. For
developmental feedback purposes, the instrument can be interpreted in terms of
multiple facets of the leader's reputation for integrity. Short-forms with as
few as 8 items that correlate with the full version at greater than .90
are also available.

Terms of Use

Consistent with its original mission as a tool to stimulate and facilitate
scientific research on destructive leadership, the PLIS may be freely used for
noncommercial research purposes. License fees for commercial applications are
negotiated on a case by case basis.

To use the PLIS in your research or leadership development work, please
contact S. Bartholomew Craig, Ph.D. (bart_craig@ncsu.edu).